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US Army Unveils 'Revolutionary' $35,000 Rifle
rbrander writes "Don't call it a 'rifle,' call it the 'XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System' and get your $35,000 worth. Much more than a projector of high-speed lead, this device hurls small grenades that automatically detonate in mid-flight with 1-meter accuracy over nearly 800m. The vital field feature is the ability to explode 1m behind the wall you just lazed — the one with the enemy hiding behind it."
I'm also a little cautious on the Fox News reporting. It sounds too good to be true. The price sounds okay, an M16 can cost up to $28,000 and frankly I'd rather hit the taxpayers than cause more deaths. I fear that there may be more serious hidden costs like this little gem:
Once the trigger is pulled and the round leaves the barrel, a computer chip inside the projectile
Computer chips are cheap but if you're putting clip after clip of bullets out during an intense firefight, I'm going to guess that on that last clip or magazine you wished that you had opted for more 'dumb bullets' versus less chipped bullets. I guess the proposed scenario makes it sound like only select fighters will have this weapon in each unit.
A patrol encounters an enemy combatant in a walled Afghan village who fires an AK-47 intermittently from behind cover, exposing himself only for a brief second to fire.
Again, that's assuming that you have the correct wall, the combatant hasn't fallen back into another building waiting to ambush you on the inside and also hoping they're not housed with women and children, as I've heard is often the case.
Sounds like a really great and innovative improvement for select uses but I really gotta question the 'game-changer' assertion. If I woke up tomorrow and found out that deployment of this weapon allowed the precise termination of all combatants with no civilian casualties and the war was basically over, I'd be happy for being wrong.
My work here is dung.
Who else saw this on the Discovery channel about a Decade ago? I bet most everyone.
I didn't.
I've been using these for years to rape snipers and campers. One of the most versatile weapons in the game.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
how much is the cost of the ammo?
"Once the trigger is pulled and the round leaves the barrel, a computer chip inside the projectile communicates exactly how far it has traveled"
That doesn't sound cheap at all.
noun
the protection of a position, vehicle, or troops against enemy observation or gunfire.
I remember the assault class in Battlefield 2142, having a rocket addon that essentially did the same thing. You scoped the cover your enemy was hiding behind to set the distance, and then add a meter or how far you need to it via the scroll wheel on the mouse, then launch the rockets which air burst at the set distance. Terrible devastating in game, I can imagine it's as or more effective in the real world.
Don't call it a rifle - because it's a grenade launcher?
One that hath name thou can not otter
The cool factor for this is very high, but so is the cost. I'm not sure it's okay that a solider could be out there wielding a rifle that is worth more than his yearly salary.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
call it the 'XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System' and get your $35,000 worth
35 K for the rifle... how much per ammunition round?
Guess is safer to ask first, last time it happened to me when I bought an inkjet printer.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I know it's trite, but violence really isn't the answer. It has dramatic effects, and short terms it gets one ahead, but more often then not it causes more violence and hate back on the initiator.
While in a dangerous world, with dangerous people all around, having a military is essential, we also need to be spending much more on making the world a safer place with diplomacy and solutions, not with better and bigger weapons and endless wars.
Folks if we have this in our hands now doesn't it beg the question of "how long will it be before the enemy has it too?"? In which case it becomes a genuine game changer and perhaps we won't need them any more! Or perhaps we simply demolish each other and go up in smoke together. How does our military decide which soldiers will carry and use these weapons? How will they debrief them when their tour of duty is over? I see a ton of questions for each remarkable comment they have made about how much more effective our troops will be in the field.
dump all these unnecessary defense spending boon doggles
Nonsense.
and get out of Afghanistan.
No.
Using this weapon *sunglasses* ought to be a blast.
YEAAAAAAAAH!
I see that there's chips in the exploding projectiles. That's very awesome, that basically allows you to more or less fire into a specific area without needing full (or even partial) visibility of the target.
Which raises my concern - shootin' off silicon explodey is awesome on paper and in Halo, but now we're talking deadly force on a target that we may not have completely identified. I can see where this helps our soldiers avoid being shot at, but I can also see where this decrease in need of visual confirmation of the target could result in higher civilian casualties.
Regardless... I'd love to fire one. Heheheheheheheheheh.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
$35k vs a much cheaper AK47... yup, asymmetric warfare wins again. Whee.
If they have zero chance against us on the battle field, they'll shift the focus of their attacks. Namely, more terrorist attacks. IEDs, roadside bombs and attacks on American civilians.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Seriously dudes... "gun".
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
It's a good start.
That's a big fucking gun!
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
Slashdot is hardly the only news source with Slashvertisements - Fox is big on them as well, and the military-industrial complex just loves that kind of thing. And some high-tech weapons are actually effective, while some fail badly in real environments; back during Vietnam, US Army rifles would jam a lot, while AK47s that were dirt-cheap to make usually didn't, even though they weren't as accurate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They have spent so much on this weapon and yet their standard issue rifle is horrible compared to more modern (hell even three decades ago) weapons.
Man this is REVOLUTIONARY. This shit is so brand new that... Oh, wait. Nevermind. I saw this gun on Superweapons months and months ago. Last year even.
I hope the version pictured is a prototype. That cast exterior doesn't bode well for the ability of soldiers to perform field maintenance. Fat lot of good your super-gun will do if it gets its works gunked up after a day in the field and can only be serviced by shipping it back to the manufacturer.
I count the billions in narcotics trafficking by our CIA to fund the things our Congress won't touch. Apparently, you don't.
Our U.S. soldiers are guarding narcotics fields in Afghanistan.
Sure, sometimes you can kill all your enemies without making far more of them in the process; that occasionally even works when two governments are fighting each other. But if people are fighting you because they're pissed off that you're invading their country and attacking their culture and you killed their cousin, killing them is just going to get more people with dead cousins pissed off at you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I wonder how many AK-47s one can buy for the price of one of these toys?
so you're firing on a target you can't see...I'd bet money that in many cases the target won't even be properly identified...somebody will be fired upon...see somebody "gophering" at a window...and promptly kill an innocent family in a house...we'll hear about it from wikileaks in 2014...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daewoo_K11
Wouldn't this weapon be more useful against an occupying force, than for them? That is, wouldn't urban "insurgents" have more and faster access to mostly-enclosed structures, while the occupiers would tend more to ad-hoc cover?
I suspect that we may regret introducing this, once it's copied and sold cheap by certain other nations which will go unnamed... Maybe it'll give us the advantage in a burned-out dust bowl like Afghanistan, but it would hurt us somewhere like Iraq.
Please correct me, I'm just a cynical jerk, not a tactician.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Even assuming that you aren't a loon, if we didn't invade Afghanistan, the CIA would not bring in that revenue, pushing down your savings number.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'm not an expert on military stuff, but I have been interested in this and I have read articles about it over the years.
This came out of research that started many years ago, the OICW program.
The original vision was that every soldier might get a fancy grenade launcher like this as his/her primary weapon. But you don't dare use a grenade if an enemy is at very close range (perhaps attacking with something as simple as a pointed stick), so the OICW was supposed to have a close-range, defensive capacity: a "kinetic energy" weapon, i.e., bullets. The result was a heavy, complex, expensive weapon that didn't make anyone happy.
But I guess the research to produce the fancy grenade launcher paid off, and here is the result.
I was always troubled by the 25mm projectile size. Can a 25mm projectile contain enough explosives to produce the desired effect when it air-bursts? I guess so, if they are deploying it.
For general issue, it will continue to be the M16 family for the foreseeable future. I have read the occasional article about the military starting to wish it had a rifle of intermediate calibre between the 5.56mm of the M16 and the 7.62mm used before the M16. In desert engagements, ranges might be farther than the M16 can comfortably handle; in jungle terrain, foliage can sometimes deflect the 5.56 bullet. But nobody wants to try to generally issue the 7.62 mm again, as it has much more recoil than the 5.56, and it would be a pain to introduce some sort of new ammo.
But now this new, fancy grenade launcher looks like it shall fill in the gap: it shoots a relatively massive projectile at up to 500 metres point effect, and up to 1000 meters area effect (source: Wikipedia). The ammo will be much more expensive than 5.56 ammo, and it will need batteries and special training besides; but if it really works as promised, it should be very cost-effective. (Even if you spent many dollars in ammo on attacking the enemy, if it decisively stops the attack from the enemy before he inflicts casualties, you have come out ahead.)
As I said, I am no kind of expert and I welcome corrections if I said anything wrong here.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Military unveils world's ugliest gun, which hopes to deter people from buying them.
dump all these unnecessary defense spending boon doggles
Nonsense.
Au contraire.
and get out of Afghanistan.
No.
Yes.
wall explode around you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGS-17
With 30 rounds of linked ammunition Soviet-designed automatic grenade launcher has range of 1700 m.
Not as sexy as the US version but wall, village and enemy combatants cannot hide.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
According to TFA, the US Army is going to shell out over $400,000,000 on these guns. Each shell (?) has a computer chip; they aren't pennies apiece.
Meanwhile, we keep hearing about an overwhelming debt and how we'll need to cut social security benefits, cut energy R&D, cut mass transit investments, cut unemployment benefits. But we've got enough money to provide a tax cut for those making $250,000+, and we've got enough money for yet another BFG.
I love my country despite it's terrible collective decision making skills.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
We've been taking out enemies in cover with TOW missiles. They cost $180,000 each, and you need to fire two to make sure a building is clear. This weapon costs 1/5 the price of a SINGLE TOW missile, is reusable and man portable. This means no need for an attack helicopter ($3000 or more per HOUR to FLY) AT4 Rocket is $1500 each use, and causes too much damage in urban fighting. This is the field mortar evolved, and it will change combat forever.
Since when do you need to cut the budget in half to accomplish anything?
Getting rid of "less than half" of what the government spends would be more than enough to balance the budget. Balancing the budget isn't the same as not spending anything.
...the pulse rifle from Aliens: http://bit.ly/dIzPZj
You're aware that Mr Gatling, a dentist by trade, designed the crank machine gun in the hope that it would end wars and killing... how'd that work out?
FUCK!
The cost of keeping men in theater is so great that if this (or any) weapon reduced the length of the conflict by 1%, it will likely have paid for itself. The real issue is whether the conflict can be solved by killing people.
Likewise, the cost of recruiting, training, and maintaining a soldier is so large that if this weapon saves some lives and prevents some injuries, it will pay for itself.
As far as how "revolutionary" the system is, well, I can't say for sure because I'm not using one. I'm guessing that this weapon will be issued to the guy in the team who would normally be carrying the M16/M4 with the M203 on it. The M203 is reasonably effective for firing on enemies behind cover. When I had the chance to fire one in Basic Training, I could very reliably put a round through a window out to about 100 meters. Landing a round a couple meters behind a berm or small wall was a bit more tricky but definitely doable. The sighting system on the XM25, the much flatter trajectory, and the air-burst feature should make these kinds of shots much much easier. It will also allow a soldier to shoot from the prone position, which isn't so easy with the M203. The important thing about this weapon is the range. Being about to put those grenade rounds out to 800 meters is a big advance over 150M with the M203.
I haven't shot or handled one of these weapons, but I can imagine firing one. What I imagine is something similar to the feeling of firing a M2 or Mk19-- my feeling was 'Holy shit! There's nowhere to hide..." That's what I can imagine with this weapon.
...after all, it's already in production, so the revolution started without our permission again. Oh, nevermind - that would involve paying less than half as much to a foreign company. Nope.
whee!
The projectile is traveling say 1000 feet per second ( let's say that the target is 500m away starting behind a long stone wall ), then the projectile explodes. To kill someone it just passed, it will have to fire lots of large fragments backward and down ( or backward and sideways - if person is standing around the corner of a building ) at at least 1000-2000 feet / second to be lethal.
The physics on this is tricky. To do this, you need to meet the "for every action, an opposite and equal reaction" law. This means something of equal mass will fly forward at ~ 3,000 ft/sec ( this is wasted material not being aimed at anything except unsuspecting persons in the distance ) . In the end, you are talking about a round with what? maybe 20 fragments ( to increase the odds of hitting something ) and each fragment will have to 1) fly fast enough to penetrate and ideally cause hydrostatic shock and 2) be heavy enough to do damage. If the rounds are too big and heavy, a single gunner will have trouble firing the weapon ( bruising on the shoulder ) and won't be able to carry many rounds because of the weight.
For close range targets - 100m, the round is traveling at perhaps 2000 feet per second. Even if this thing blows up over someone's head, it seem most of the blast is going to continue forward, not towards the person behind the wall. Perhaps they hope the concussion wave will be strong enough to be lethal. A very high percentage of the metal fragments should blow forward due to the already high velocity of the round.
Keep in mind, this round is spinning, so the blast will go in all directions. It is not possible to tell the bullet to fire downwards when over the target.
note: a 22 cal bullet fires at bout 800-1200 feet per second. An M15, the standard round for the USMC, fires at about 2,700 to 3,500 feet per second and can have a range out to about 800 meters.
What percentage of US casualties are friendly fire incidents?
How much higher will that figure go when these are deployed everywhere?
Eventually the US will get so good at war they'll be the only ones getting kills! Unfortunately the death toll will be in the millions but that's besides the point. U S A U S A U S A!!!!!!!!! Greatest country in the world!!!!
Brilliant. Maybe we can find other people to surrender to, also. Think of the savings!
A device that will actually create shovel-ready jobs.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
So you have a way to instantly kill somebody you can't see who hid behind a wall in a gunfight. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know! I understand that innocent people also tend to duck behind cover when a firefight breaks out. I know that's what I would do. So now we have yet another way of killing people we can't even see. I mean, I know that this is on balance a good thing; it will save lives, speed up gun fights, etc. But unless the rules of engagement for this weapon are pretty strict and strictly followed, a bunch of innocent people will be killed by it.
Compare smart bombs to regular ones. A standard 1000lb bomb really isn't all the expensive. Adding a guidance package costs more than the bomb. Well that isn't a very good deal... Until you look at what it takes in terms of unguided bombs. Back in the unguided days you talked about numbers of bombers to have a defined probability of killing a target. So if you wanted to hit an airfield or a factor or something it would be a case of "We need 4 bombers dropping a full load to have a 95% chance of killing the target." Never mind the collateral, often civilian, damage, that can get expensive. Now we talk in terms of targets per bomber. A single bomber, even a small one like an F-15, can be sent out ot destroy multiple targets because one bomb per target is usually enough, maybe two.
Makes them real worthwhile in many cases.
Seems highly likely that firing grenades (not the most precise of ballistics) from afar at people hidden behind walls will lead to more innocent deaths.
Look-- I can understand the questioning of the physics behind a round moving 2000 feet per second exploding and killing people below it. It sounds like a difficult problem to solve. I'm certain that you're not the first person to wonder about this.
Still, this weapon has been in development for a long long time. Presumably, they've tested the ammunition at some point in the 10+ years that they've been developing it. During that testing, I'm sure they figured out how to make it kill things despite the physical challenges.
Well speaking for those of us non-trolls all i can say is: this thing is fucking rad. As far as price goes, have you seen the army budget? Drop in the bucket my friends.
Ah, now I see. All that spending is justified because it's a pride issue. We can't go around doing things that might in the least way be construed as "surrender".
For the water balloon version from Walmart!
Unfortunately, the true revolutionary rifle is the one that can be reliably and inexpensively mass produced by the millions, the one that won't jam, and the one that can easily be understood, fixed, and used by even a small child.
Can it do Death Blossom Mode?
...but it ain't no Zorg ZF-1
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
So if we are using (expensive) TOW missiles to clear entire buildings, how does an AT4 cause too much damage in urban fighting? Not to mention the CS variant is specifically designed for use in an urban environment.
Also, one important purpose of the attack helicopter is to get around (over) all those OTHER pesky buildings that ruin the line-of-sight to the target. Plus, the TOW is guided, (unlike the AT4 - but not the new XM25), greatly reducing the chance of missing the target and hitting the window beside it where a family is cowering on the floor. However, the TOW range is far greater than the XM25 (4500 meters), and the explosive payload is also far greater.
Even with the new weapon system, I don't see the TOW going away any time soon.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
If you study guns, you'll notice that the most reliable ones fire larger, heavier, rounds and themselves are larger and heavier. Good reasons for this:
1) The tolerances don't have to be as tight. When things are large, there's more room for play. A bit of dirt doesn't matter nearly so much.
2) More recoil force and/or gas. When there's more pushing back against the action, it cycles better. Also you can load up heavier springs, to push it back harder, again making it more reliable.
That's what the M2 is still one of the most reliable guns out there. Shoots a big heavy round and is built with some room for error in it.
Wonderful, but you have to consider carried weight. Troops have to slug a lot around, gun and ammo weight matters. While it might sound nice to say "Just give them bigger guns with bigger ammo!" that isn't necessarily so practical.
Accuracy also comes in to play. Part of the AK's reliability comes form the action. If you've ever watched it in slow motion it positively slams shut, even flexing and vibrating a little. Well enough but at what cost? The cost is accuracy. It is not a good gun at range. "Spray and pray," are very much the operative words. The M4/M16, however, are much better. They aren't quite rifle accurate, but they aren't bad.
It is a tradeoff, and it is easy to pull the "grass is greener" type thing, look at the other gun and say "Well clearly that is better!" However if you used that, well then you might have a different opinion.
*sigh*
When the first 'modern' (ish) armies were coming into play, France was the premier ground-based ass-kicker of the world. (Primarily due to the work of a Corsican, but there you have it.) They pretty much set the standard in terms of tactics, unit organization, et cetera - and thus, other militaries followed suit.
In the same manner, Naval terminology (and indeed, the English language itself) were heavily influenced by Britain's Royal Navy, who kicked so much ass that they had to be fitted wtih prosthetic wooden legs because that much ass kicking causes gangrene.
Finally, our military is a professional military. It isn't a bunch of bedwetting Republicans. They're not going to introduce confusion on the field of battle by moving away from terms that have been established for centuries, just because Joe the Rentboy Rentin' Senator from Bumfukyltucky is more cowardly than the Frenchmen he mocks.
Communication between the projectile and the gun is the key and possibly the weakest link. Given the range, it is using radio waves. Why can't I turn on a cheap EMI jammer? Shouldn't that break the whole thing
Just not for the military. The 5.56 part of the weapon was cool too. It was spun off and developed separately in to the H&K XM8. The miltiary really seemed to like it overall. A former roommate got to shoot one and said it was awesome, almost stable enough to shoot one handed. R. Lee Emery tried one on his show and loved it. However for some reason they canceled it.
"The ... system, which costs up to $35,000 per unit, is so sophisticated that soldiers are proficient users literally within minutes."
It's an iPhone for blowing shit up!
Am I the only one who can't wait to use this in the next Call of Duty?
In fact, if you eliminated all DOD spending - took it to zero - you'd simply cut the deficit in half, leaving it at $700 billion (higher than any time in the past, save the last two deficits).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Fucking Americans.
For that kind of money, plus what we spend on each soldier's armor, training, etc., I think we are approaching a point where it will be less costly, in money and American soldiers' lives, to simply develop and field battle-droids. Also, remember the dark side: any technology that is developed and fielded by our military is in the hands of our government, and may be used at some point by them to oppress the people. Think it can't happen?
until kids in afpak have a choice between A. Starvation and B. Taliban school, there isn't going to be any end to the fighting. if anything good came from wikileaks, it is that ambassador to Pakistan who has been screaming at the guys in washington about this.
I know some of the guys who tested and rejected the SCAR, they said it was just too easy to break. I expect this to get to units who can afford it and be rejected as unreliable, or to be treated more like a mortar or heavy MG. I would be shocked to see this rifle get much use.
Getting rid of less than half of the defense budget would be sufficient to balance the budget, at least going on the numbers shown here: Robert J. Samuelson - Our burgeoning budget and the politics of avoidance.
It'd be good to get some up to date numbers, but if it is tracking the numbers there it's certainly something that I would expect true deficit hawks would be looking at.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
To my mind, this capability is in fact far more important than the 'shoot behind walls' factor. Honestly, for $35,000 you can carry around something capable of blowing UP the wall and the people behind it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
http://sdjewishworld.wordpress.com/2009/12/19/u-s-to-sell-2742-tow-missile-to-saudi-arabia/
The US military sold 2742 TOW missiles plus parts, equipment and training for $177 million. This brings out the cost to around $60k per missile even if the entire price was just TOWs (which it's not). TOWs are not nearly as expensive as you make it seem, but your point remains
I've found it amusing how much French there is in the military shibboleth/jargon. No one bothered renaming defilade as "freedom cover".
The English language is full of French words, its not really something related to the military. The Normans (as in Normandy France) conquered and ruled England for quite a while.
What kind of moron thinks we should 100% eliminate our military spending? I'd go for a 25% cut, myself, but the neo-cons and their ilk will never allow it.
We will never solve our budget problems because there are too many sacred cows. Military spending, medicaid, medicare, welfare, etc...
If we had sane leaders and were willing to do what was needed across the board we could solve our budget problem in a decade.
Yeah, that's totally it. It's a pride issue! We should totally get some flowers and put them in our rifles, and and all military spending, it's just small penis compensation that the US maintains a strong military, amirite?
Idiots on both sides of this issue make me fucking sick. Sure, we can and should cut our military spending but we still need to maintain the world's strongest fighting force if we want to maintain stability.
Sounds like it from the article that the rounds are detonated remotely, not by a very accurate timer that's set according the the distance.
So what happens when someone builds a jamming unit for the frequency used? Or if the authenticating method turns out to be less than perfect and a clever enemy detonates the entire ammosupply while still in the clip or a meter after leaving the barrel?
[sarcasm]glad to see they are spending my tax dollars on something useful...[/sarcasm]
All I see lately is goverment money wasted on weapons and movie industry. So if they are not trying to kill someone they are trying to abolish file sharing. 2 biggest mistakes of this year.
Note that the "turns counting" range determination described in the video is very clever. The difficult determination of the speed of the round is eliminated by knowing the twist rate of the barrel.
With an accelerometer in the round, it could easily direct a charge downward even if spinning.
It could also have some mechanism to substantially reduce forward motion directly before impact, say a small initial charge directed forward or even just some kind of air brake.
The rounds would not be cheap but if they really worked well it would be worth it, and it's not like you're going to use one unless you are pretty sure you need it.
As others have noted, they are deploying them so they probably work to some extent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Isn't every new clever killing device fueling a never ending arms race with the rest of the world? You could argue that others would develop this stuff if we didn't, but isn't it also true that reverse engineering U.S. designs takes them to places they otherwise wouldn't have gone? And isn't this made easier as more and more of the technology gets pushed into software? I get the feeling this new gun will only help our troops for a decade or two, at which point they will find similar guns pointed right back at them. You can't stop innovation, but you can stop funding it.
You're technically right if you count it one way, way wrong if you don't.
Talk about just the general fund - Social security has its own tax, not part of the general fund at all. It's pretty self sustaining, at least until the 2030's. Same for medicare and unemployment comp. Some of these programs are projected to be in trouble, especially if money borrowed out of them in prior years isn't put back as promised, but they may or may not follow those projections - there's a lot of axes being ground there when people talk about 20 years out. Let's not count where these are properly funded by their own separate taxes, just if we have to use the descressionary budget for them.
Now, do you count the VA budget as civilian? Military retirement? How about foreign aid - do you count the aid that is earmarked only for purchasing military grade weapons systems and can't be used for civil improvements as civilan spending? Highways - that ought to be civilian, right? Now what about burying 2 inch thick steel plates under roads on US military bases where tanks maneuver a lot? (We can hide this in Dept. of Transportation funds, and even claim the road projects are to improve routes leading to isolated and poor communities - there's lots of isolated communities of trailer parks on the far sides of US mainland military bases). Black projects - why hide a top secret item in some part of the military budget when you can hide it all they way over in Health and Human Services? We finally have confirmation that the CIA directed parts of the national endowment for the arts budget to prove this has been going on, but we may never know about the majority of such cases.
Here's how it looks for the 2011 descressionary budget, which is still with all the black projects hidden, so if anything, its more one sided than this.
Military/Security: 895 Billion dollars - 63%
NonMilitary: 520 Billion - 37%
Or, we could count everything, in which case, we don't just throw SS and unemployment in, we add servicing the national debt, and then break out what part of the debt is from prior year military spending. This looks pretty similar. You can get pretty close to the military being less than half if you add only the non-military portion of the debt and add in
SS and such, but that is simply not an honest way to figure it.
Quick Source - try www.DeathandTaxesPoster.com
Who is John Cabal?
Want to carry lots of heavy rounds and have high mobility in an urban setting? It's almost 2011, where is my fucking POWERED ARMOR!?
Ok maybe they aren't as practical in the so called "real world" but the terrorists will be so shit scarred they'll give up immediately!
But... the future refused to change.
And how long (measured in months) until the Bad Guys(TM) have them too? Then what?
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
The TOW is fired from a helicopter or possible a IFV. While the structure the missile hits is obviously going to suffer damage as long as the helicopter of IFV isn't right next to another building when it fires the damage is going to be largely limited to the target. The AT-4 has to be fired by somebody in the middle of the urban environment, the back blast of the AT-4 is significant.
The standard AT-4 model has a roughly 300ft 90 backblast cone. Anyone inside this cone could be seriously hurt by debris from the baseplate debris and the force of the blast itself. Firing an AT-4 from a confined space (inside a building) can do significant damage to that building and people inside it. Here's a video of an AT-4 being fired. Watch the shock wave around the guy as the weapon fires and then imagine that inside a building. You'd do almost as much damage to yourself as to the poor bastard you shot the thing at. Here's another video not only explaining the problem but describing the CS (confined space) variant of the AT-4 meant to solve this problem.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
As long as this one takes out those with the AK-47s nearly every time?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
.$400 million is nothing. If it keeps US soldiers alive and healthy, it might even save costs in medical care over a lifetime. One of the biggest military expenses is people, active and retired.
Of course buying big screen televisions for the barracks in Camp Lejeune and not sending them to Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place would probably keep them even safer.
-- Terry
I saw this thing in Metal Gear Solid 4 two years ago. By unveil do they mean, "This has finally passed all testing and we'll likely put this in service but still use the X designation while we shake out the bugs?"
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
But "This is my XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, there are many like it but this one is mine" doesn't have the same ring to it.
Okay, they specified the range in the article as 2300 feet. Which is 700 meters, not 800.
Second of all, they don't specify if that's "effective range". Nor whether it's effective range for point or area targeting.
Maximum range of an M16 is 3600 meters.
Maximum effective range for point targets if 550 meters (1800 feet).
Maximum effective range for area targets is 800 meters (2624 feet).
For the uninitiated:
A point target is a target you can actually sight and shoot at. A person, object, etc.
An area target is usually beyond the effective ability of the shooter to accurately sight, but is still within the effective "kill" range of the weapon. The far side of a field, down a street, etc.
Now at the MER, if you're using iron sights, the target is smaller than the front post. A decent telescopic system can work wonders for sighting and accurate fire at this range though.
Now if the 2300 feet is the MER for point targets, that's impressive. If it's area-targeting, it's less so. Though the smart ammo does make up for that.
And yeah, it's not really a "rifle". While the ammunition may be delivered the same way, it's really a semi-automatic mini-grenade launcher. So even if you don't hit your target dead on with the projectile, you can still kill him when the projectile explodes.
Now the ability of the weapon system to "dial" the range out or back a meter is quite interesting. But I don't foresee this replacing the mainstay weapons systems in the TO&E. They'll probably be issued to squads rather than every individual. Kinda the way heavier weapon systems are.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Another infinitely deep pork barrel my tax money is fluttering down in.
Suffice it to say that war is no longer fair.
At least give the other guy a chance to know he's being shot at.
Wow, so it kills even more people? that's revolutionary! What about a really revolutionary weapon, that gets a banana inside a hungry person, all he just have to do is open his mouth "Fly over Ethiopia, "There's a guy that needs a banana." "Shooooooooooooom" the Stealth Banana Smart Fruit!" (Bill Hicks)
What's the DAM rating versus DPS? Does it require a certain Strength level, or Guns skill? Can I equip it on a companion?
If it works well, deploy em'. 35,000$ is much cheaper than replacing a soldier, and I'm sure the price will come down.
On that note, I wonder how expensive a soldier is. Many of these guys went straight outta school into the military, so they were never in the workforce. In that scenario, we can figure the cost much easier.
Medical subsidies
Public Education
Training
etc...
From a raw Machiavellian standpoint, cannon-fodder went the way of the peasant many years ago. The government has a lot of money invested in every citizen.
A Kalishnikov, made of parts that can be cast in the most rudimentary of foundries and machine shops, to outfit armies of millions for next to nothing.
A mortar will get behind a wall easily. Mortars are inexpensive, the rounds are inexpensive, and further they can have fins that could easily be computer controlled. Would have made a lot more sense to build a guided mortar system.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But what I see is the future terrorist using human shields.
So when is the civilian version of this coming out? It seems that this weapon would be most effective at getting those damn kids off my lawn. Oh, but remember to shout, "Get off my lawn!" first, before shooting. It's more sporting to get them on the fly.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
chips in the bullets?
insurgents will just leave USB's around the battlefield. Sweet, a free usb!
*plugs into rifle
uh oh, insurgents behind a wall, time to shine!
BLAM
"enlarge your penis"
Can't wait to get my hands on this in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Gonna miss my trusty M203 and spewing n00b tubes all over the map, but gotta upgrade someday.
So what if you can buy 117 AKM's. What's one guy going to do with 117 AKM's?
Oh, maybe you want to have a bunch of guys each carrying AKM's. It seems very convenient to ignore the cost of recruiting, training, feeding, clothing, transporting, housing, communicating with, and providing showers, shitters, laundry service, and medical care for those guys. Even if you're in a third world country, you're looking at less than ten armed and trained guys for the cost of one XM25. If there's any modicum of training and support, it's probably far fewer than ten guys per XM25.
Of course, it's wrong to ignore all the costs associated with one US soldier. My point is that the cost of the weapons is only a small portion of cost of fighting a war. Just comparing cost of weapons is a totally stupid and pointless comparison.
To something like, say, a "Bolter".
There is no -1 Disagree.
From TFA: "We're able to shoot farther and more accurately, and our soldiers can stay behind sandbags, walls or rocks, which provides them protection from fire."
That's until Wikileaks and that egotistical, homosexual, baby loving, terrorist, rapist, murderous, unfit, phsychopathic, left wing liberal coward Julian Assange gives the plans away ruining the US democratic process and terrorizing open governments worldwide!!
That's not the way of the Empire.
(out of those, military might be in the end necessary to maintain overconsumption)
One that hath name thou can not otter
You know, figuring out destabilizing practices and avoiding them might help, too...
One that hath name thou can not otter
This is something even Fox has reported on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clca6YtYvCI
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
A soldier suggested to me that we use Minnesota's Alliant Techsystems's XM-25 rifle with some squads as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our soldiers' day-to-day Taliban shooting. So I decided to let him deliver the rifle to 5 squads to see how the soldiers got on. Besides, our ammunition manager had been using it and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the battlefield ?
Once he'd got the rifles up and firing we let the soldiers try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: XM-25 was a pretty good replacement for hand grenades and the soldiers could still do their fight as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost the count of the number of complaints received from soldiers who could not shoot how they were used to or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the hand grenade. The final straw came when one soldier lost several hours of Taliban shooting when XM-25 had troubles with its rangefined and could not properly hit the target.
Needless to say, the Minnesota's Alliant Techsystems team offered no support whatsoever. I made the soldiers remove XM-25 from their weaponry and lets just say he is no more fighting with us.
Seems odd to have to be the one to say it.
Reading all the misinformation that is being spread in this thread is really hilarious. Things like: the caliber of the AK47 is smaller than that of the M16. Etc. It goes on and on. If you aren't going to go out and shoot them yourselves, people, at least pick up a book and learn a little. You never know when it might come in handy.
Those features are all very well, but, does it have an iPod/iPhone dock and/or WiFi/BlueTooth?
Can it tweet 'shots fired' directly to Twitter?
e.g. @XM25 just fired 2 rounds 400M's knocking out 4 insurgents. Hooo-Yaaah!
These soldiers look ridiculous with these helmet when their enemies are 2000 feet away.
The weapon should be able to change no just the tactics in fighting. It should also change
the helmets and boots, for example.
I know the US doesn't care about such things any more, but don't these violate the Hague Convention on "exploding bullets"?
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
There is a huge whole in the thinking of the military tactics around this. Supposing the quoted soldier is correct, and there is really no way to fight this weapon from cover, or flee from it. There is one further option they are overlooking: Hand to hand combat. If you deploy a unbeatable weapon at range against me, I will just try to engineer the fights to be at such short ranges that explosives are off the table. Is this going to make insurgents run, or use more IEDs and close quarters ambushes?
When in the history of war has a new weapon ended war with it's lethality?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
... Rifle grenades for a loooooong time and cover is still as important as ever. The important new features for the XM-25 are range (800m is double the range of a typical 40mm grenade launcher) and its airburst capability, sustained fire and relative ease of use. Using smaller grenades also means reduced damage, a desirable feature in CQB. However, there are and there will be countermeasures deployed: the device needs its laser rangefinder, so expect the use of particulate smoke to make ranging difficult. Like in all warfare conditions, the best defence is offence so if I expect my forces to go against XM-25 armed troops I'll have snipers deployed to take out soldiers carrying it - hopefully eliminating the weapon as well. It's a nice advantage to have but only the Nazi elite believed in miracle weapons to win the war, and watch where it has led them. Aggressive tactics and adaptability trump any technological wonder. The Russian campaign in WW2 should have taught us that, but I guess the iWar generation has taken over and will need some blood by the megagallon to understand it. I'd like to have one of those in my arsenal, but to believe one weapon will change the face of warfare is naive. Not even nukes did that.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
And there I was asking myself why the US' debt was big :D
At one point, you should ask yourselves why and how some illiterate peasants wealding 100$ Kalashnikovs (60yo tech mind you) can defeat the most expensive army in the known universe ...
> Hell, there are a few fully functional miniguns in the hands of private owners in the US
A great summary of a lot of the problems the USA is facing.
fyi: Posting without karma and anonymously because I have no interest in any resulting mudslinging. Still, that's my opinion.
I can't wait until every U.S. police department decides it "needs" these to "protect" the citizenry.
Is it like the inkjet scam? $35,000 for the rifle then $200 for each bullet...?
No sig today...
You know what would also save costs? If they wouldn't fire at civilians whose mobile phone allegedly looked just like an AK-47.
Nice. Now the USA troops can kill civilians much easier that are try to hid behind a wall. Like 864,531 in Iraq and 8,813 in Afghanistan. That's like a ratio of 1:317, American to Muslims (there was 8813 civilians killed in the 9/11 attacks). My sources was a quick Google search, and particular this My guess is if you Government get to a ratio of 1:500 then 9/11 was avenged enough. You still wonder why the Muslims hate the USA so much?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
See a lot of comments here assuming that this is something for a US soldier, but in time others "the enemy" (whatever is supposed to be the enemy at that time, might be an ally now) will have bought the same stuff.
It just goes on.
So, we just invest (again) enormous amounts of money and labor into making "better" weapons, where is that money coming from, and what could have been done with that workforcer?
Nothing new here.
The idea has been long time around about programmable ammunition and even some manufacturers have been selling these for years. For infantry and for vehicles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7WqCbIpbjk
That is 40mm grenade (3P)
And at least many should remember the Delta Force 3 game where players did have the prototyped gun in use.
It's great to see governments devising ever better ways to kill people. Let's not forget that, of the two major wars the US is currently embroiled in, the Iraq one was started under several false pretenses (Irad had very little to do with Al Qaeda, and no WMDs), and the Afghanistan one is being waged against US-created foes, who are still in business mostly because the US drug policy gives them plenty of money-making opportunities.
Methinks what we need is brains and hearts, not guns.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I'm not sure - not that I know a lot about guns (or indeed anything) - in fact, I don't even remember the proper names of any of them, so I hope those more knowledgeable will fill in the empty spaces for me. However, I do remember seeing a documentary that among other things told about why guerrillas preferred the AK-47 (I looked that one up) over the advanced American super rifles: it is simple and robust. The American one tended to jam because of any dirt in the mechanism and was difficult to clean etc etc, whereas the Russian one kept working and was easy to take apart and clean.
The American rifle had impressive specs - superior precision, where the AK-47 would just spray bullets out in the general direction where it was pointed; but then that is more of less what you want anyway.
So this new super-duper rifle, will it actually perform to specification when you have dragged it through 10 miles of choking mud or sand?
Really, grenade launchers, helicopter gunships, tactical communications systems, active armour, satellite reconnaissance and all.
Sometimes the technology is so deeply alluring that it is tempting to see enemies, where there are none, just to get an opportunity to engage a target.
Of course, we'd have to tell everyone that we were fighting for freedom and democracy, and adopt a sorrowful yet dignified pose when the medal is being pinned to our chest, but what fun it would all be to get your hands on such expensive toys.
I can't believe no one on Slashdot has played with the actual XM25 itself in a game that came out June 2008, 2.5 years ago. You can test its battlefield effectiveness there yourself, in a combat environment similar to what we're seeing today. And the plot takes place in 2014, which makes the fielding of this weapon in real life decently timely. And you guys call yourselves nerds.
http://metalgear.wikia.com/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_4_weapons#XM25
"War... war never changes."
Col Lehner says the enemies options have become basically "flee or die". There's 2 problems with that. #1: the wall is probably part of a building; you can always go into another room. Or (as anyone who knows a US Marine will know) you can charge. Marines don't run from suppressing fire, they run toward it. That kind of tactic doesn't require training, it requires fanaticism. Tell me again what kind of people we're fighting?
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all. -- Thomas J. Kopp
Although I can see how this weapon would be very useful for taking out snipers behind cover, I cannot help but feel that more grenades in an urban environment is not a good thing. A girl from my school, Linda Norgrove was recently killed during a hostage situation in Afghanistan where US soldiers allegedly killed her with grenades in a botched rescue attempt. Although the solders claimed she was killed by a suicide vest an autopsy revealed she was killed by US army grenades and investigations into what actually happened are still under way.
A very accurate laser rangefinder is less than $500. I've seen them for $100.
The ranging is based on speed and time, I imagine. Microprocessors with microsecond accuracy over one second are $1.00.
I'm pretty certain a ghetto variant could be hacked together without much difficulty.
Is "lazed" another made up verbified word in this context?
Hopefully someone can confirm it's cromulence.
At one point, you should ask yourselves why and how some illiterate peasants wealding 100$ Kalashnikovs (60yo tech mind you) can defeat the most expensive army in the known universe
You can't win if you don't have a clear military objective to achieve to proclaim victory.
Who wants a piece of this? Come get some, you smelly diaper-headed, goat-fucking faggots! Dokka dokka dokka! Mullah mullah! Fuck that shit!
TOW missiles are also frequently mounted on Humvees
The caliber of AK-74 is smaller than that of M16...
Since when is 7.62mm (AK) smaller than .233 (5.56mm not NATO) for the M16?
So what happens if the enemy manages to jam the communication between the gun and ammunition since they're talking over some sort of wireless connection or something?
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
The biggest criticism from the rest of the world levelled against the USA forces in Afghanistan is that they are killing far too many civilians. This is also a bad tactic as general Stanley McChrystal admitted last year they were creating more insurgents by their actions not fewer. He called it the hearts and minds offensive and implemented new tactics involving less use of indiscriminate weaponry (bombing) and closer contact combat. This new weapon is non discriminatory, who knows how many women and children might also be taking shelter behind the wall with the gunman. Not good, not good at all .....
I wonder if they've solved the "momentum problem" of the "smart grenades". I've seen some of the early tests of them and I think I noticed an issue. Very little of the shrapnel overcame the momentum of the grenade resulting in little if any injury to the half of the targets "behind" the grenade, pretty much negating its usefulness. So basically all you had to do to survive one would be to be on the side of the bunker where the window was, you're ears would be ringing and you might have a few cuts, but you'd be alive.
this require more skill but its more powerful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATBr_b-6ZKI
This better be more reliable than the AK-47.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
This is my XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System. There are many like it, but this one is mine...
More opportunities for the American military to murder even more people around the world.
Nice to see the US still has it's priorities right[1]
[1] To help American readers, that's called irony.
Farewell to the 5 D's of Dodgeball: Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge! Now you better run fast or have an emergency escape chute nearby...
When you no longer have the technological edge, opponents with the edge in numbers will have the advantage. Specifically, now that the US has lost it's edge in technology, how long will it be before the reliance on technology multipliers starts to bite?
Stalin once said that quantity has a quality all its own.
And the real purpose of this new gun is not for the foreign battlefields. It's intended to be used against us, the American citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H subjects, in the urban jungles of what's left of New York, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, etc after the shit hits the fan for real here in the former USA.
"I've heard quotes that mortars were the most dangerous weapon on the battle field in both Vietnam and WWII; accounting for more killed and wounded than other weapons"
Not really.. The classic Augustine paper "Land Warfare" says that in South East Asia (SEA), more than 50% of casualties were from land mines/booby traps (that is, IEDs in today's parlance). Very, very difficult to detect and/or counter, while having very high effect on morale, and often severely wounding, rather than killing outright
the paper is in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronics Systems, Sept. 1986, but is probably available elsewhere
Call me naive but this whole thing sickens me to the stomach. I am not passing a moral judgement on any one just expressing regret the levels to which we humans have stooped. Everytime i see the word "enemy", i think yet another life and countless other inextricably linked lives being destroyed. Talking about them, in these terms, is hard to digest. There are no winners... some are just more dead than others.
Indirect fire in an urban environment like this could lead to an increase in civilian casualties. Where one would only fire at a confirmed target right at or closeby a window or cover, when he exposes himself, you could now lob a grenade into each window, rather quickly, where the blast damage could harm others as well.
I am not sure how this applies to current conflicts, but I wonder, if it will find its use elsewere than the military (police with less lethal grenades, etc.).
I'm absolutely certain, beyond a shadow of doubt, that *every single weapon ever deployed in a battle field will inflict civilian casualties* - every single one. As long as there is a decision based on incomplete data that is life or death for the person making the decision and it has to be made literally in a second or two it is going to happen.
In this particular case this weapon replaces weapons that have a VERY wide kill radius - namely larger explosive devices. I'm also certain that it will happen as you say and be reported at someplace like wikileaks (and maybe even there), however this misses the fact that it *reduced* the amount of civilian deaths. Indeed, wikileaks would never disclose the amount (nor could they if they wished as it isn't really a definable number) that were saved by this because they lived to close to an actual military target and were "collateral damage" - this number will *far exceed* the one you are worried about.
Weapons such as this are an attempt by our governments to reduce civilian casualties to one primarily cased by lack of information. The ability to harm precisely the people you intend to and no one else would be a MAJOR step forward in casualties - while still a tragedy any time it happens we are MUCH better off with today's guided explosives than we were in WWII where we had to flatten and entire city with thousands of bomb to get a single factory.
Argue about going to war, that is the root cause. Weapons such as this are *vital* if your aim is to reduce civilian casualties. Even with perfect killing devices that *only* kill those that the soldier intends to are going to incur civilian casualties. Deciding if it is a war that ought to be fought is where the argument needs to be, not if a weapon that increases the ability of the soldier to hit their target may be accidentally used against a civilian.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
...give them more info. Space Marines (humanities super elite, genetically modified warriors) in the Warhammer 40K universe are so superior, they don't fire bullets, they fire rocket propelled missiles that punch through walls, armor, and soft fleshy bits and explode causing ridonkulous damage; and they make a kool sound too. Much like this weapon, their "bolters" are good at killing things dead, especially idiots who try to hide behind cover. Assuming people clickity click on the links they might begin to understand. And maybe even get hooked. Heybiff
Even the Sun goes down.
The 7.62x51 was a dead design at birth. The Germans figured out in the late 30s that fielding a long-range, high powered rifle wasn't tactically effective. Aimed fire at a 1000 yards was a dream of the mid 19th century tacticians, the reality of effective combat was massed fire from automatic weapons. This was proven conclusively in WW I and the carnage of the Somme and other battles where thousands were wiped out by machine gun fire.
Automatic fire from heavy rifle rounds (8mm Mauser, 7.62x54R, 30.06 Springfield, 7.62x51) work well in heavy machine guns, but is impractical to field for individual soldiers due to the weight of the weapon, parts and ammunition. Almost all machine guns in that caliber are crew served.
What the Germans did was cut down the 8mm Mauser round and create the 8mm Kurz ("short") and then build what we now call the assualt rifle, the Sturmgewehr. The Russians were on the same track, and aside from the commie propaganda surrounding Kalashnikov, ultimately copied this for their own medium rifle round, the 7.62x39, and created the Kalashnikov (which still required Hugo Schmeisser to show them how to mass-produce).
With the medium rifle round, individual soldiers could produce massed automatic weapons fire, carry more rounds for the same weight in a smaller, lighter weapon.
The 7.62x51 was "born" because short-sighted Americans had a generally good experience with the Garand in WWII and figured they'd improve on this. What they ended up with was a rifle nearly twice as heavy as the AK-47, almost uncontrollable on full auto and carrying 10 less rounds in the magazine. Once the US started mixing it up with AK-wielding NVA in Viet Nam, the US rushed the closest thing they could find that compared into production, the M16.
Of course, this rush to service had all the attendant problems we can expect from a bureaucracy. The troops weren't trained to care for them, Colt didn't figure out the need to chrome the bore and chamber, and the guns initially performed poorly, although most believe that these things were fixed by about 1971.
This unfortunately legacy is what causes many to cling to the 7.62x51 and the M14. It's a great rifle (with a synthetic stock) if you are sniping, but its a terrible tactical disadvantage as a primary infantry weapon.
... and don't call it a "gun", either, or else you'll have to stand naked with your hand on your crotch repeatedly chanting "This is my XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, this is my gun, this is for fighting, this is for fun."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
According to Wikipedia the Price per Round is $24, witch is extremely cheap compared to other weapons.
Snipers have had them for years, I know they were used in desert storm, nearly 20 years ago.
You know the bad guys are hiding behind a cinder block wall, you should into the wall, the bullet explodes shortly after it impacts (so its inside the wall when it explodes) and the other wide of the wall opens up like a massive shotgun blast killing everything behind it or against it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Gene Simmons had access to this technology and used it on Tom Selleck in 1985: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d6Djog2B-c&t=1m10s
The bullet holds a timing chip inside and simply does a countdown from the instant it's fired.
Which means the gun communicates the distance to the bullet. How does it talk to each bullet one after the other? It would be sensible to do so by a physical connection to the casing while it's chambered. But perhaps there was a fear of passing a current through a live round so they did it wirelessly.
What if it's done wirelessly? Dude on the other side of the wall has a laptop and hacks your bluetooth. He then sets your bullet to pop 0m from the barrel. Ouch.
If it were possible someone could rig up a cheap device and spread them around, a sort of TV-B-Gone or rather Soldier-B-Gone.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I am heavy weapons guy. An this...is my weapon. She weighs one-hundred and fifty kilograms and fires two-hundred dollar custom tooled cartridges at ten-thousand rounds per minute. It costs four-hundred thousand dollars to fire this weapon...for twelve seconds.
[End Of Line]
Have you read "The Food of the Gods" by H.G. Wells?
What can be used for military purposes will be. Advantage to he who uses it first. Very depressing. Basically true.
At some point perhaps people will be making smart bullets in straw-hut villages using little microchip fabrication plants ala Bladerunner, but right now, the majority of bullets are made in incredibly low-tech ways. We figure (probably rightly) that a country which can afford to make these bullets has huge vested interests in not having a war with us. We can make it worth their while not to, and they have a lot to lose, too. No one who can afford these bullets in large numbers are a real war threat for us.
Besides, we're going to SELL these. We're a huge exporter of arms, or haven't you heard? We want to patent this and sell it before the Israelis do, or they'll make the money instead of us. Arms companies aren't just powerful in the US because they have ties to the military, they're powerful because they bring in those export dollars.
That said, this is a handy assassination tool. And even a poor country can afford ONE bullet. I wonder if the bullet would be damaged travelling through a window before it went off? If so, the world just got a lot more dangerous, particularly for the people who thought this was a good idea.
the last surviving part of the xm29 OICW project that was all the rage in military FPS games back in the late 90s.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
And sly Afghans will defeat it with a Kalashnikov anyway. What a waste of taxpayer money.
It's a good thing the US hasn't deindustrialized itself and industrialized China at the behest of the Chicago School of economics or China might have the capability to field this weapon, in massive quantities, before the US!
But anyway, even if it could, by some incomprehensible miracle, ramp up industrial production of a known technology more rapidly than the US, China would never sell arms to the other side. They don't like money that much!
Seastead this.
From TFA:
With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever," Lehner told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. "Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away.
This advertisement could stand a bit of healthy skepticism. Right now, I can think of an easy way to defeat this weapon: use some kind of overhead cover. That's right, a simple roof covered with sand bags, or a bunker, would be enough.
The spokesperson for this company seems to lack a crucial sense of imagination.
It's called net-widening. They say it will save lots of money because new technology Y costs less than existing technology X, but really they just end up using X and Y.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
It's almost like Duke Nukem but there is an actual device that will probably get a few soldiers killed and a couple of billion tax payer dollars squandered trying to make it actually do what they say.
I've read what has been allowed to us public peons and I am not impressed. I love high tech, this is not it. It's too many things, it's too small of a projectile, it's too complicated as an all-in-wonder device.
There are far superior tools that have a proven record,
I suppose I'll have to actually document that when I have time.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Everytime i see the word "enemy", i think yet another life and countless other inextricably linked lives being destroyed. Talking about them, in these terms, is hard to digest. There are no winners... some are just more dead than others.
The ones that are less dead are the winners. Seriously, though, dehumanization is a big risk of combat, from what I understand. Not having been in a war myself, I can't say how avoidable or unavoidable it is -- it may not be something a soldier has a choice about if he wants to live -- so I am not prepared to criticize much, but it is probably not a good thing.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Social security has its own tax, not part of the general fund at all. It's pretty self sustaining,
HA, that's fucking hilarious if you actually believe that.
Then, the squad deploying this expensive weapon may be destroyed by a couple of ($5,000-$10,000) LCCMs!
http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml
Its practical to spend up to $20,000 to destroy two $35,000 weapons ($70,000) and the trained squad using them.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Sweet, now we have Boltguns! Can't wait till they roll out the Power Armor and Chain Swords!
Doesn't the AA-12 automatic shotgun already do the same thing with the right type of rounds? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchisson_Assault_Shotgun#Cartridges
the CIA in that case would just be doing more south american and far east narcotics business. what's loony about what I wrote?, it's mainstream news and mainstream history